What Was Feed the Future?

Global food prices in 2006 began rapidly increasing due to a confluence of drought, high oil prices, and various macroeconomic factors that devastated low- and middle-income countries.

Global leaders gathered in response and by 2010 the Obama Administration’s comittments coalesed as the Feed the Future Initiative.

Unlike emergency humanitarian food relief, Feed the Future would focus on preventing the next food crisis, with a focus on food production

“By Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7256134

Tea fields, Photo Credit: Jacob Patterson-Stein

Nutrition

And Poverty

Arid region in Kenya, Photo Credit: Jacob Patterson-Stein

19 “Target countries” were originally chosen. Each country was selected based on a data-driven analysis of “level of need” and “opportunity for impact”

Within each country, Zones-of-Influence were created. The idea behind the ZoI was to crowd-in activities where need and opporunity were highest. Since poverty and hunger are complex and multifaceted, the thinking went, any approach to address them should be too.

For example, in Bangladesh, the ZOI was most of the southwest corner of the country, while in Malawi the ZOI covered regions prone to droughts in the north and flooding in the south.

Examples of Zones-of-Influence

The idea behind the Zones was that water, nutrition, improved seed, ag tech, and any number of other activities would all interact.

Activities could, and often did extend outside of the ZoI, but FtF would measure results within the ZoI since that is where work was concentrated.

The goal was to achieve more in the Zone-of-Influence than what would otherwise happen if these activities were more dispersed.

This set up–a concentration of activities in the ZoI and areas outside with little to no USAID interventions–creates research opportunities and challenges. There is the obvious comparison: see how progress differs between ZoI and non-ZoI areas. BUT the ZoI itself was chosen because it was different in some way from the rest of the country. So what did we do?